Thursday, December 19, 2013

January: New Years was kicked off with fireworks in the streets and shots from our neighbours. I was half way through my time living in Durham, and it was fantastic. This picture is from the bus stop near my house, and I never got tired of seeing that row of houses every day. My friend Kelsey who was living with me over there had to leave in January as well, which was very sad. I worked on a lot of papers and planned trips that month. There were also some field trips to Iron Age oppida sites!

February: This month started with me headed to York for the Yarn Bombing event at the York Art Gallery. Met up with my friend Jim and we had a lovely day of it all, with a fantastic pub lunch in the middle~ mmm York. For school there was a load of surveying the castle (pictured), and loads of paper-writing struggles. I went to see a play in an old theatre, and did a 'working with lime' workshop followed by cafe adventures with lovely friends.

March: Ohh March was a pretty big month! I turned 21, and went to York on a little holiday (as I do). Field trips included Escomb Anglo-Saxon church and a Roman fort. There was a lot of battling with geoplot for a surveying assignment. And the biggest thing in March was that I went to Malta for a week! Easter holidays started, and there was an archaeology trip to Malta...so I went! I've never seen archaeology like what they have there, and it was just incredible.

April: The most exciting part of April was my pilgrimage to the RRS Discovery in Dundee, one of the famous Antarctic exploration ships! Went to York again (this happened a lot), and also did a lot of school work. Easter break took up most of the month! Also, Jim and I crocheted 20 swans and it was quite the ordeal.

May: There were two very intense weeks with a ton of early mornings, work at the computer labs, and trying to find working printers. And cafe movies! I did a lot of studying ahead of time, so while everyone else was panicking about studying later, I went to Wales for a week for a pirate festival. It was super cool! My exams went well and I had some lovely visits with people and days out. At the end of the month I headed down to London, and moved back to Canada.

June: I started working at the Oliver & District Museum! It was just a brilliant job, and I couldn't have been happier (though it could have been a bit cooler outside!!) I carpooled with my dad everyday, and we'd stop for coffee in the morning sometimes~

July: Lots of museum work, sailing, and hanging out with my family and Kelsey! There was also a small trip to Calgary to drop stuff off in the house for the school year, and attended the Sun and Salsa festival in Kensington.

August: The best part of August was a 3 day camping trip with Kelsey and Steve which involved hiking, hail storms, and no clocks. It was amazing and none of us wanted to leave. Museum work wrapped up at the end of the month, and saying goodbye was a sad event. I started rock climbing in August, and also seeing a boy.

September: Moved back to Calgary, and the final year of my undergraduate degree began! This picture is of me and my housemate Amy at a gallery opening party at the Glenbow Museum. There was a lot of running around, climbing, going to cafes..etc!

October: October involved a lot of lab work for my paleoethnobotany class, and some paper writing. The boy came to visit in the middle of the month, and we went rock climbing a lot. The biggest part of the month was when I went to Denver, Colorado, for the Geological Society of America's 125th conference! My gravestone erosion research was presented by my supervisor, and I met up with a bunch of my amazing lady-scientist tumblr friends. We hung out a bunch over the conference and it was amazing. The flight on the way home was delayed for ages and we didn't get back to Calgary until 3am...to find it had snowed.

November: My friend Mary came to visit for the long weekend in November, and we had an awesome time playing tourist all over the city! I'd never been up the Calgary Tower before, and it was quite the place! Things ended with the boy, and I went rock climbing a lot with my friend Michelle. There was a lot of frantic paper writing on my behalf, trying to get everything done in time.

December: All my assignments were finished in time, classes wrapped up, gingerbread archaeology contests were won! I had all of my exams, made masks, had lovely cafe brunches, climbed 4 times a week so far...December, as it currently stands, is lovely! I only have 4 months left in this degree and I'll be out in the world for a year! Crazy... I'm heading home to the family in a few days, and I'm sure Christmas is going to be wonderful! x

Sunday, July 14, 2013

So first up on today's long-over-due-blog menu, is the Townsite of Fairview!

Yesterday was Oliver's Sunshine Festival Parade, which as the summer museum assistant-student people we went in so show the community...that the museum is present and running again! It was pretty cool to see how many people turned out for it and how much effort everyone put into their floats! And it was a billion degrees out so we got iced coffee afterwards as well and drank it way too fast.

After work Janell and I got ready for an adventure up to the townsite! There is an interpretive sign (a different one than in that picture) that told all about the history of the town and how the hotel burned down, as well as a good deal about the fir trade in the area and the old Fort Okanagan. It was well done, if now very outdated! There were also about 5 other people up there when we were there...which we were veeeery excited to see!

Walking around the townsite however, is very anti-climactic after reading about how exciting the town used to be! There is nothing left there anymore...save maybe a few rusty flattened buckets and a flatter area we suspect might have been a road. It's sort of a nature preserve now, but it would have been lovely if sooooomething was left for people to see. It's eery as well to think of how so many people lived there, and in a matter of a few years even the ghost town had fallen apart and vanished. Not to mention all the looting that took place on the site. -sigh- this is why we don't know as much about the site as we would really like...

Part too is more museum things.
We finally got close enough to the kittens without them running off to get some decent pictures of them! In the first one is the mother cat with McKinney. The second is of Caribou (grey), Fairview (tabby), and Stemwinder (black) drinking from the water dish we leave out for them now. It's so hot now, we don't want them getting dehydrated out there!

Also, Saturdays are now Mystery Box day. We're currently on 'Box 7'..in no numerical order at all of course! The first thing I catalogued was this box of famous 'Dr. Chase's Nerve Food'. If you can read the label there, it says the pills contain Strychnine and Arsenic! How...nice... uh.. They look like mouse droppings as well, isn't that just so lovely?

And as an added bonus, I was pleased with my hair and decided the internet needed to see. Cheers! x

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Today, besides seeing McKinney and Caribou peeking out of the industrial mining equipment, we made an interesting realization!

While cleaning and cataloguing a mountain of lanterns today, we came across a very early version of the Coleman lantern logo. We have seen a couple of logos with the radiance coming out from behind writing, but hasn't come across the phrase before.

'The Sunshine of the Night'

Such a fantastic logo! It sounds like something from a noble house in Game of Thrones! It was discussed at length today, as it cropped up on more than one lantern. It's too bad they stopped plastering it all over things.
There were a few lanterns that still had kerosene in them as well, which we weren't totally sure what to do with...but catalogued all the same! Might have to get them drained.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Figure B. Me and my brother with other people's pet's. The first picture was taken by Kelsey, and I'm with her ferret (frrt) Hammond. The second is Brendan with Summer the pug who lives on our street. Adorable!

Figure C. The ever scary dummy in our basement in Museumworld. When we found him he was standing in that spot, peering around the corner...but was wearing nothing but shoes. And he's only got one hand, so Janell and I thought that was no good. We've been shifting him around slightly over the last few weeks, and adding things. This week we gave him a new hand and a shirt, and found a giant cross to prop up behind him because he needed something behind him!

Friday, June 21, 2013

Well, today I sat in a chair and catalogued like a champion! My co-worker Janelle finished the license plates that she's been battling through all week, and went on to photograph them, while I started to tackle a massive box of antique shoe making equipment. I have now memorized the Nomenclature book's classifications for the different stuff that kept cropping up, and didn't even need to reference it after about 10 minutes (or 5 shoe lasts..but who's counting!)
There were even tiny baby shoe lasts, which I had to withhold myself very strongly from filling out the form with solely that for the description!

After I got home from work, my brother announced that he's gotten his grad/prom/thing outfit today..and that he now had a tailcoat for a while! So pictures had to be taken, and we decided that if he was going to be Victorian-esque than I had to join him. Thus a photoshoot was the result.
Sorry for the strange colourings on all the pictures, I was fiddling while editing them this evening! The close-up of Brendan was deemed 'Downtown Abbey-like' by him, and therefore fit for my blog.
There will be more pictures of Brendan and his grad stuff..when that happens! I think he needs to get some white gloves going on, yeah? yeah!